Community Events (non-Alliance)

Moderator: Nancy Winters, MD, FIPA, ABPsa 

Being and staying emotionally alive in the clinical hour is not always easy nor a welcoming experience. At times the analyst’s aliveness collides with patients’ anxieties, their psychic walls, or dead spaces. Hopefully, these encounters penetrate psychic barriers and awaken nascent or truncated development. For some patients the process of enlivening is experienced as dangerous, risky, destabilizing: a Bionian ‘catastrophic change.’ 

This six-part online workshop is a special opportunity to follow Scabbiolo’s psychotherapeutic work with patients throughout the psychoanalytic process. The series will alternate group supervision between selected Scabbiolo’s patients as well as other attendees’ selected patients. As a team, Scabbiolo and attendees of the workshop will supervise the unfolding psychotherapeutic treatment revealing the evolution of the work over time.

Event Description

How do we as therapists think about and respond to fluid self states in our clients? This case study highlights the impact of internet gaming and nonbinary gender on one client’s identity. By making use of semiotic and transitional space, drawn from the work of Julia Kristeva and Donald Winnicott, it shows ways to formulate new psychic awareness, and new ways of being and growing alongside our clients.

Presenter: Katherine Weissbourd, PhD

Discussant: Ann Glasser, PhD

Details

Our newest series presented by Dr. Avedis Panajian will seek to address the role of transference and transference interpretations in analytic therapy.

Issues related to transference that will be explored during the series:

*Excessively personalizing the transference.

*How to facilitate the unfolding of the internal world of the patient.   

*The significance of the analyst’s identification with the dimensionality of the primitive sensory world of the patient and analyst. 

The way one lives in one’s body is a decisive factor in psychical life. It vitally affects the sense of ‘realness’ of our existence and of the world around us. But how are we to take account of the life of the body in the clinical situation? Traditionally, psychoanalysis has thought of the body mainly in terms of what the mind does with it (e.g. managing the drives through repression, or using the body for symbolic purposes, as in hysterical conversion symptoms). However, in the wake of Winnicott’s recognition of psyche-soma, we may now wonder about the psychical life of the body itself.

Discussant: Gil Kliman MD

Full description to come.

“The danger of death does not become acute until it is clear to every beholder that a resounding success is at hand.” Bion, 1991

As Bion reminds us, growth and change in a successful psychoanalysis are likely to be experienced unconsciously as a catastrophe. This ‘catastrophic change’ can result in dysregulation and chaos at every level of a person’s existence. In this presentation, a case illustration will be used to explore a catastrophic response in the body, an autoimmune illness. In other words, the immune system’s rebellion against the self.

Early in life, if mothering is experienced as othering, frightened and frightening attachment expectations can get set in stone. Winnicott said that the infant’s first mirror is the mother’s face, in which the infant learns to feel seen and known, and to feel for and know the other. Developmental research shows how a caregiver’s “still face” stirs deeply disturbing emotions. Whether maternal mirroring or mirror neurons is our metaphor of choice, the challenge for the psychoanalyst is to be-hold our analysand's darkest terror while strengthening their protective shield.

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CLIMATE:  "HOW WE GOT HERE, AND WHERE TO NOW?"

With Bill McKibben and Sally Weintrobe

Psychoanalytic thinking teaches us that trauma leaves the subject fractured, less agentic, more subject to iterative, stalled revisitations of the traumatic event. In this presentation, and with the help of Jean Laplanche's metapsychology, I argue that significant possibilities for psychic transformation and for contact with experience are courted when we make ourselves passible (Lyotard, Scarfone) to returning to the site of the traumatic.